To Katherine Wisser, an archivist who teaches at Simmons College in Boston, the National Archives was always more than a mere government agency. It was a standard bearer, embodying the strict code that her profession lives by, of painstakingly preserving the raw material of history and treating it with absolute objectivity. No fact, or ream of data, no journal or letter or historical document was more or less important. Truth, in Wisser’s view, was its only mission.
But then President Trump took office this year.
Wisser and other archivists across the country watched in horror as he fired the National Archivist Colleen Shogan and gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the main source of federal funding for the National Archives and other archives across the country. He appointed an acting director of the institute, deputy secretary of labor Keith Sonderling, who declared he would reshape the agency to “restore focus on patriotism, ensuring we preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country”.”
Now, Wisser doesn’t know what to think.
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“There’s a lot of concern,” she said. “I try not to catastrophize, because I don’t think that’s helpful. I do think that things feel really dire.”
Across Massachusetts, archivists in a variety of roles and institutions said they worry about the possibility of funding cuts that could force layoffs of critical staff at archives that depend on federal funding. And many worried about an erosion of the values that uphold archival practices.
“You can’t have people saying, ‘I don’t like that document. Take it out of public circulation or destroy it,’” said Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin, whose office oversees the state archives. “That’s why any attack on an archival process or archivist is an attack on truth and facts.”
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Sonderling’s mission “sounds very partisan,” which directly contradicts the mission of an archivist, Wisser said. “Our job is to take care of the record, not privilege one record over another. So I’m not sure what patriotism has to do with this.”
To Wisser, his declaration sounds “very much like the kind of language we’ve heard in other quarters, like Project 2025,” she said.
Trump’s attacks on the archives have brought sudden attention to a profession that typically works out of the public eye.
If archivists lose their jobs, “archives don’t take care of themselves,” Wisser noted. “If I want to inquire about a decision that my government made, I need more information, and if there’s nobody minding the shop, then I’m not going to get to see that.”
The job of an archivist has some overlap with that of a librarian — for example, both of them maintain catalogs and help researchers find relevant material — but archivists more frequently work with historical source documents and other rare or unique materials that were never intended to be published for wider consumption.
“In the course of everyday life, individuals, organizations, and governments create records of their existence,” said Jessica Farrell, an independent archivist based in Massachusetts with more than 15 years of experience at institutions ranging from Harvard Law School to the McDonald’s Corporation. These could be personal, like photographs or letters, or official and widely shared, such as recordings of a public speech.
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Government records are particularly important, Farrell said, because “government connects with individual lives in so many ways,” generating materials such as property ownership records, birth, marriage, and death certificates, and court documents. Archivists organize and preserve these records, and make them accessible to the public. These materials can and should ”be interpreted and reinterpreted over time,” Farrell said.
In short, said Smith College director of special collections Elizabeth Myers, “archives are about keeping the receipts.”
However, because archives often depend on “contingent labor” and rely heavily on grants to function, Farrell said, the federal funding landscape is “really worrying.”
The Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded $267 million in grants and research in 2024, according to its website.
Across the profession, there is a consensus that though archivists might preserve and document the actions of governments, they don’t professionally comment on them. “It isn’t my job to valorize or demonize. It’s to bear witness,” said Myers.
United States presidents are legally obligated to participate in the archival process as well. Since the 1978 passage of the Presidential Records Act, which became law in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, United States presidential records have been classified as government property, and presidents have been mandated to turn over their records to the National Archives upon leaving office.
According to the records laws, Wisser said, the National Archives is only responsible for receiving the records, not collecting them. All that archivists can do is “bring attention” if they think something’s missing, she said.
In 2021 and 2022, the National Archives raised concern that it hadn’t received all the records from Trump’s first administration. This eventually led to the August 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, during which agents found classified documents including information about nuclear weapons.
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Although Shogan was not appointed to her position at the archives until 2023, Trump marked her for dismissal even before his inauguration, saying “we will have a new archivist” in a January radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt. Since Shogan’s dismissal, other NARA staff have quit, retired, or been fired. The Society of American Archivists, which has a membership of more than 6,000, released two statements in February in response, condemning the firing of Shogan and the terminations of archivists at the National Archives, the National Park Service, and other government agencies.
“Federal archives are foundational infrastructure for a democratic society and should serve their non-partisan function without political interference,” it stated.
In the meantime, Wisser is not sure what kind of records from the current administration will be preserved. “I don’t have confidence that they are going to follow the record laws,” she said.
Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru. A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.
